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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

> Compare it to European attitudes

Yeah... Can we swap? Or like find a middle ground?

Here in slovenia, we have socialist buildings from 1970s that someone decided to culturally protect, and the owners cannot renew the leaking facade and add insulation, because the outside has to stay the same, and puting insulation on the inside would reduce the inside space and make walkways and doors too narrow to pass (or carry a fridge through or drive through with a wheelchair).

Buildings like this: https://www.zurnal24.si/media/img/83/c3/35bf6005bfff08c83654...

More photos: https://www.zurnal24.si/slovenija/ne-smemo-narediti-fasade-k...

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I guess it depends on what it is. A friend of mine’s family owns some land where Tanum carvings are: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Carvings_in_Tanum.

The government probably knows the carvings are there but doesn’t really force his family to take any steps to protect the rocks as far as I’m aware. They are just chilling in the forest covered in moss and dead leaves all the time.

I suspect they would have something to say if his family tried to develop the land though.

We have the same issues with heritage buildings in Australia too, there's no silver bullet.

And a lot of those buildings just happen to accidentally burn down, such as the White Bay Hotel in Sydney.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Bay_Hotel

The solution to that is simple: Enforce an exact reconstruction to be paid by the owner in case of destruction of the original for protected-status buildings. That's usually more expensive than keeping the old building viable.

It's important to preserve modernist and brutalist architecture, so I can sort of see their point. I'm surprised there isn't another option in that specific case though (Can they not just add doors to the stairwell? Or do they oppose that too?)

Too much brutalist architecture is being covered in tacky "neo-classical" plaster facades.

> It's important to preserve modernist and brutalist architecture

Why?

> Why?

Because history is as valuable to humanity as memory to the human.

History, yes. The actual obsolete building housing humans, no.

So is every building history, then? Are we not allowed to knock down any buildings, since they are all part of history?

You don't need to preserve everything to remember history. If we never destroy old buildings, we'd have to abandon all our cities and find new places to build new cities, because we can't just keep living like it's the middle ages (or whatever time period you feel we need to preserve).

A lot of people thought that we should not preserve pre-war architecture, and that's why we now have a lot of modernist and brutalist architecture in its place.

I do agree that aesthetics and fitting into the neighborhood should come into the equation somewhere: the Barbican is probably worthy of preservation, some random shitty shoebox municipal library or housing estate probably isn't.

Half of our cities have buildings just like that. There is nothing special about them... just ugly socialist reinforced concrete buildings. I would understand if there were just a few left over, but there are large neighbourhoods just like that.

Brutalism is an interesting architectural movement, but speaking as someone who lives in a city that has human-scale architecture, lots of trees and lots of eclectic housing, I understand Europeans who don’t want their cities dominated by remnants of the misanthropic planning regime that was imposed on them.

If you want to preserve it, buy it yourself and keep it that way. Don't force others to live in depressing brutalist blocks if they don't want to.

Sometimes I wonder how much of the drive to preserve old architecture is just the hoarder mentality applied to literal buildings.

Not every piece of a particular architectural-style is a masterpiece worthy of preservation.

> It's important to preserve modernist and brutalist architecture

Not really. Brutalism was a mistake, and one building is enough to remind us what it was. Maybe a scale model in a museum is enough.

what makes a building socialist?

Buildings in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact contries during the Cold War were often constructed with an ideological bent in mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning_in_communist_...

Microdistrict type buildings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict

Microdistricts were good… new stuff is usually an unplanned cash grab.

built by the government during socialist times, and built in the same was as pretty much all the other socialist buildings were built (reinforced concrete or from premade concrete blocks). A bunch of our cities were built during the socialist era, and pretty much all the buildings look the same, and some things (especially parking garages) are actually the same all over the country.

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